Nuke it from orbit - it's the only way to be sure
About 7 months ago I made a big mistake with Visual Studio 2003:
I undocked one of the debug windows.
Thanks to the non-intuitive interface (I can't even call it counter-intuitive, because that implies that it merely operates reverse from what you'd expect), it was impossible to restore the state. I'd get bizarre layous that were different in during coding and debugging. I did some half-hearted google searches and turned up nothing appropriate.
I've been living with it and cussing every time I have to show the call stack because it would hide the autos and locals and if I tried to group them all together, it would fail to hold on to my wishes in the next debugging run.
Currently, I'm tracking down a bug and the process has been frustrating to say the least. Having my tools behave in a non-optimal way has finally pushed me over the edge.
Here's how to reset your Visual Studio 2003 window layout to the defaults:
- Close all instances of Visual Studio
- Go to the folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsernameHere\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1
- Remove the file devenv.xml
Restart Visual Studio and bask in the glory that is the smell of factory-new windows.